Muse

For more than half a century, Ontario, Oregon was famous for one thing.

It is the home of the Oreida tater tot.

Yeah, you heard that right. Tater tots. See, the town is on the Oregon-Idaho border. So naturally, the potato factory there is called Oreida. And in 1953...

The owners of the Oreida potato factory invented the tater tot.

Yep. The tater tot was a 20th century invention. In fact, the term tater tot, it's actually a registered trademark of the company.

I'm a huge fan of tater tots. I think that they've contributed something really fantastic to the world, and I will forever thank them for that.

That's Natalie Fertig. She is the federal cannabis policy reporter for Politico.

Ontario is right on the border. It's really, really close to Idaho. You know, I'm from a small town, so I know what small towns are like. And it's definitely a small town that's far out from most major cities, and it's very disconnected from the rest of its own state.

And after the tater tot was invented in 1953, not a whole lot happened in Ontario. That is, until 2019.

Snow dog!

Anybody out there smoking on that sticky, icky, icky? Woo! Woo! Woo!

Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!

Woo!

Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo! Woo!

Woo!

Woo!

Well, in case you missed it last night, hip-hop legend Snoop Dogg made an appearance in Ontario, Oregon, of all places, performing in front of a huge crowd. The free concert was all part of a block party celebration for the grand opening of Hotbox Farms, Ontario's third recreational marijuana dispensary.

Ontario is a place that's changed a lot over the past couple years.

It's definitely taken a turn from the home of the tater tot to the home of, I mean, honestly, probably one of Oregon's highest-grossing cannabis cities.

I'm Jeremy Siegel. This is Politico Dispatch, and today we begin a new series on how the emerging patchwork of marijuana laws in the U.S. is reshaping society called the Edge of Legalization. Part 1, Border Weed. How a small town of just 11,000 people became a cannabis mecca for cross-border marijuana sales.

When I was in Ontario, I talked to a guy named Brandon St. Germain, who works at Treasure Valley Cannabis Company. And he was one of the first people to get involved in Ontario's legalization. And the company he was working for noticed Ontario and said, hey, if they decide to legalize, that will be a really big market.

We had, like, about 2014 identified Ontario as a really good potential border play because you have the massive population center that is Boise, Idaho. You have all of southern Idaho.

So he was sent down and he started helping out with the local effort to legalize in Ontario. And then once they did legalize, this line started outside City Hall. And the line was for turning in their materials for the cannabis applications for dispensaries.

There was this hyper-competitive political climate in this tiny town. And no one was, like, really – like, the city was not expecting it.

The thing is is that the application process was not going to open for a couple months. And so this line, this was, like, new Apple iPhone and new Nike shoes and the last Lord of the Rings movie coming out on steroids. Everyone was in this line to turn in their paperwork to get a dispensary license because people were going to be given the dispensary licenses in the order that they showed up. The town just said it's first come, first served.

No one's really done this in cannabis before. And, like, we even told them when they were, like, hey, this is what's going to happen. We were, like, that's a bad idea. Like, you should do a merit-based application. Like, if you tell people first come, first serve, it's going to get wild. And, I mean, it did.

So Brandon worked for this Spokane company. And his Spokane company had said, hey, you know what? When Ontario opens up, this is going to be a lot of money. We should focus on this. And so Brandon came down and they hired...

armed guards. We're talking like ex-military veterans like they're standing there with M16s they got bulletproof vests on they got pistols on their hip. Why? Because we're talking millions of dollars in revenue to stand in this front line you know like. I asked Brandon I was like isn't that

overkill? And he said no because millions of dollars were on the line and he told me that someone had done some economic calculations right around when the legalization happened and they estimated that Ontario's market was going to be 120 to 130 million dollar market. Wow. Which is just so high. Yeah. Especially for a town of 11,000 people. So legalization in Ontario even before

it's actually legalized is huge and it's because they know there's going to be this big market of people wanting to come in from Idaho where weed is very not legal to get pot. How do things play out once weed sales actually start? How has it changed life in Ontario? Because Ontario was in

Oregon and Oregon doesn't have sales tax on anything. The town was already a destination for people living right along the Oregon-Idaho border. They would come to the Walmart and the Home Depot that I heard a lot about when I was there. The Walmart as a destination. But when cannabis was legalized that started bringing people from farther in Idaho. So that started bringing people from Boise that were not going to drive an hour to buy slightly cheaper two by fours but they would drive an hour to get cannabis. And one of those people was Michelle. Whereabouts in Idaho do you live? Southeastern Idaho. Okay so it's a bit further like how long of a drive is it? Four hours. Four and a half hours. That's a pretty hefty drive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And she said that she's been driving more than four hours from her home in southeastern Idaho. Wow. And I asked her why are you coming this far? That's so far to go. It's still illegal when you take cannabis back across the border into Idaho. You can still be arrested in Idaho. Why don't you you know find you know an illicit grower in Idaho? Why is that not the route that you're taking? And she said that she wanted comfort of buying cannabis from a licensed tested legal store. It's nice to know what you're getting. It's nice to know basically all the science behind it. Yeah. Yeah. Four hours for science. Yeah. She actually said that she liked knowing that it was not transported in a gas can was her her way of expressing that she wanted to know what was in the products that she was buying. So there are now thousands of people coming into the town every week. The city manager told me that over 11,000 people crossed the border into Ontario to go shopping every week. I drove around to a number of the dispensaries when I was there and you can tell that it's it's a different set of people. You know I remember waiting in this very long line in my car to get into a parking lot. You know everyone gets held up at all of these lights in this big complex because there's so many cars coming through to all of these different stores and I looked up and there's a Black Lives Matter bumper sticker on the back of this. I think it was probably a Jeep. And in a community, Malheur County, where Ontario sits, it went 70 percent for Trump in the last election. And so you can really tell the people who are coming who are not from Ontario. And that's increased traffic to the city really extensively. The police chief told me that that means there's more traffic accidents. The local police department is stretched pretty thin. So it's definitely changed

the culture of the town from a small sleepy potato town to a major shopping destination for Idaho's most populous region. It's ruined Ontario. Really? Yeah. So while I was in Ontario, I talked to Rachel Quaid, who was a woman. She was sitting at a cafe in the small historical part of downtown Ontario on the other side of the freeway. And I asked her, how has the cannabis industry changed your town? And

she said that she hates it. You know, being born and raised here, we're used to it a certain way. And of course, it's going to grow over time. But it's just gotten extremely bad within the last year. Extremely bad. To the point that I'm wanting to move somewhere smaller.

I also talked to Betsy and Pete at Hotbox, and I was immediately attracted to talk to them because they are...

not what you might think of as your classic cannabis consumer.

And for people, like particularly for my wife, who need it for medical conditions, I mean, it's absolutely ludicrous to deny somebody access to that.

Pete's in his 60s. Betsy's 80. Betsy needs cannabis for neuropathy. She says she uses it to sleep at night. And they looked kind of like they were going for dinner downtown. You know, they were your quintessential Western sort of older urban couple. How often do you guys come?

Well, we need to buy more so we don't come so often. But we were just here, what, not a month ago. Okay. So we just need to buy more. For some reason, we started to try it out and then we liked it.

It was just they were such obviously these kind of older intellectual Boise folks who'd driven up to come to a weed dispensary and break Idaho law by taking the cannabis back into the state with them. And I'm just picturing as I'm talking to them, Idaho police pulling over Betsy and Pete in whatever car they'd driven and pulling over an 80-year-old woman and dragging her out of her car to search her car for cannabis products. I don't know if that ever is going to happen. They're definitely probably not the stereotype that the Idaho police are looking for. But still, it's just such a fascinating example of, one, how the consumers of the cannabis industry have changed so dramatically since it's legalized, but two, also who feels compelled to drive an hour from their home and break their own state's laws in order to get this product.

It's so fascinating hearing all of these stories and thinking about the fact that obviously this is bringing a lot of tax revenue into Ontario, into Oregon that isn't going into Idaho, it really makes you think about the way legalization can change life for people and can change life in a town in unexpected ways, especially given all of the other states that have also recently legalized weed in just the last few months, like Arizona, South Dakota, Montana, Virginia, New Mexico, New York, New Jersey. Is that something you think about a lot as a cannabis reporter, the sort of side effects of how legalized weed can change things?

Oh, definitely. It's the creation of an entire industry. This rarely happens in life. I mean, the last major industry that was created was the tech industry. And on top of that, this entire industry is not federally legal. And all of the rules and all of the laws that are created by the state governments and the federal government regarding this industry are having a day-to-day impact on everybody's life that's interacting with it. I counted with the seven new states that just legalized in the last five months, there's 20 new border regions between legal and illegal states. There are little towns in all of those regions that could experience something similar to Ontario soon. When we look at, say, the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the town of Camden is going to be flooded with Pennsylvanians and people from Philadelphia specifically coming to buy cannabis. You already have this happening in western Massachusetts where people from the northern reaches of New York State are coming over to buy cannabis. You have this in Colorado on a couple different borders. There's actually a little town in southern Colorado that is very close to New Mexico that may soon be losing its border town status because New Mexico just legalized cannabis. So this is something that's going to be occurring and then ending as more and more states legalize cannabis. We have 18 right now. That means there's 32 left to go. So there's a lot more border changes that are going to happen.

Natalie Fertig, thanks so much for talking with me.

Thanks for having me.

Natalie Fertig is Politico's federal cannabis policy reporter. This episode is the first in a two-part series on the unintended consequences of marijuana legalization laws. So stay tuned for part two tomorrow. I'm Jeremy Siegel. Thanks for listening.